500.A15a3/1156a: Telegram
The Secretary of State to the Ambassador in Italy (Garrett)
91. This morning I had a conversation with the Italian Ambassador in which I told him that if the Preparatory Commission for the Disarmament Conference should meet on November 6 without an agreement having been reached previously between Italy and France on the naval question, the situation as it is now might be inflamed and a subsequent agreement would be made more difficult. In all probability Great Britain would invoke, in that case, the escalator clause in the Naval Treaty, thus making necessary a change in the levels of naval armaments by the three powers which had already ratified the treaty.
I told the Ambassador that I had decided to make a final appeal to France and Italy that they try to reach some provisional agreement at once, and that I had communicated my intention of taking this step to the British and the Japanese Governments, who, no doubt, will make similar representations. I referred to a previous conversation I had had with him in which I had suggested that the possible solution of the problem might be, instead of a binding treaty between the two countries, a unilateral declaration by each announcing a reasonable, nonprovocative program of naval construction until 1936, reserving until that date the decisions on the theoretical questions still at issue.
I told the Ambassador that I had talked with the French Ambassador, and that I had said to Claudel, as I now said to him, that the security of the two powers was not being increased but on the contrary was being decreased by adding to their existing naval armaments.